Alternative energy

14/07/2012

The energy question has two sides, political and technological-economic.

1. The political question is; does the today’s political system, be it democratic or non democratic, (like in Chine), ready to make a major change in standard of living and way of life of the citizens or voters of his country? The answer is no. Even in Germany, the most advanced country in the world (i am not counting the scarcely populated Scandinavians) in the environment questions, decided stupidly to shot down the atomic plants and replacing them with coal plants. And don’t tell me Angela, a scientist, doesn’t know what she is doing.

2. Technology; solar energy was intensively introduced in Germany Spain and other European countries, due to subsidy that put the electricity costs paid to suppliers on 50 Euro cents per kWh, compared to cost of 5 Euro cents of atomic energy, and up to 10 cents from other conventional sources. Even the wind energy costs only something between 20-30 euro cents, but its capacity is limited. The hope was that some technological breakthrough will happen in the field. Until now it did not happened, even if some advance was made, and in the laboratories some new finding were discovered, but non of the existing technologies are economically feasible without subsidies and probably also not efficient as to CO2 footage. So even without speaking about the day- night and the accumulation problem we are very far from using sun as energy source.
The biofuel appears to be an economic disasters, good only for some agronomic Plutarchs, who intensively destroy the environment with their pesticides, and destroing the Amazon forest, not to speak about the increased food prices it causes.
All the other technological solutions, like fusion reactors, are probably 30-50 years away from us.

3. To be realistic, the only realistic partial solution is transferring the energy industry from oil to natural gas. New technologies increased substantially the natural gas reserves, and its CO2 footprint is 30% down from oil and 50% from coal. Some environmental conservatives are fighting against the new technologies with some esoteric argumentation. It is very contra-productive.

4. Other big CO2 and methane “producer is the livestock for meat.There are technologies that can create meat artificially without the methane footage”. I never tried it (no beef meat or pork on my diet) they say the taste is same. If someone really needs to eat steak, let him get used to the artificial one.

5. If we fight against the US-Australian-Europen-Asian consumerism, and offer the CO2 tax as an only solution, we will fail, because there is no political system that can survive after a decision to sweep out private cars and energy wast from our everyday life.

So we are for to be right, or we are to give a chance to some positive development.